The Formula of B2B influencers For Social Media Success

We recently had an interesting conversation with a head of digital of a known brand. Her company was making big steps into employee advocacy on social media.

It was at an early stage where the team was divided into different schools of thought. Part of the team favored the idea of having casual Twitter accounts, where the employees share personal life updates and some additional business-oriented content.

On the other side, there were those who advocated business-oriented profiles that focus mainly on sharing industry news and updates.

The executive was curious to know what’s the recommended way for her team to use their personal accounts. Is it the business-focus approach or the one with the personal touch?

To answer this questions we ran a little research. We’ve analyzed 154 Twitter profiles of B2B influencers. We wanted to find their patterns of behavior that made them influential in their field. Here are the results:

B2B Influencers talk with people. Many people

The average B2B influencer had conversations with 1,336 people.

Think of that number for a second. A huge chunk of their time on social is dedicated for, well, being social. Being a friendly person that talks with others is what makes people follow them and engage with their content.

This insight is getting even more interesting when focusing on the top tier of the B2B experts.

We looked into the top 75 B2B experts (by their influence score) and found that they had conversations with an average of 1,787 people. This is almost twice as much compared to the second tier of B2B experts. The other 79 experts talked on average with 908 people.

Less than 50% of their tweets are links

Being promotional on Twitter is very common. Many people dedicate a big portion of their tweets to link sharing. But one of the biggest mistakes on Twitter is to be over promotional. Sharing only links, even if they are relevant to your field of expertise, is considered a spammy behavior.

That’s why only 49% of the B2B influencers’ tweets are links. Even though this number seems to be high, it’s still a sign that more tweets are non-promotional and do not include links.

They amplify others

Retweets are an important part of the influencers’ Twitter behavior. On average, 18% of their tweets are Retweets.

The reason for this high number is that retweets are a great way to make a connection. Liking and following a person can pass unnoticed, retweeting can’t be missed.

As the Beatles said, “the love you take is equal to the love you make”. Share more love, it may come back at you.

What are they talking about?

7% of the tweets are pure text. We looked into the influencers’ content to see what kind of topics they talk about. The experts mainly keep their tweets professional, and most of them are not afraid to express their opinions about industry news.